Dr. Richard Boothby is professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of a handful of books on Freud and Lacan and Philosophy. I have been obsessively reading his latest two books: Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred and Blown Away: Refinding Life after My Son’s Suicide.
In our talk we lay out how Lacan theorizes anxiety and its relation to das Ding: the enigmatic, unknown zone of the other. Richard shows how this theory of anxiety differs from those put forth by Heidegger and Sartre. For Sartre anxiety was linked to the radical dizzying, nausea inducing freedom that we as humans essentially are. It's not just that we fear falling off a cliff when standing next to its edge, we fear that we ourselves might throw ourselves off. It's our freedom to do so or not. There's no one stopping you from doing it except you. However, Lacan complicates anxiety one step further. Yes, it is eventually linked with one’s existential freedom, but Lacan crucially first locates the primary source of anxiety somewhere else—within the neighbor, indeed the first neighbor: the mOther.
Boothby explains how Lacan reframed Freud’s Oedipus Complex insisting that it’s actually the infant, not the father, that weans itself and argues that it’s the the name of the father: the function of language, rituals, symbolic gestures and identities that helps to allay the infant’s anxiety in face of das Ding.
For Boothby, these Lacanian concepts ultimately help us to rethink the origin of the sacred, and they shed light on how we might better understand why we continually in the terrifying confrontation with das Ding tend towards forms of tribalism.
In the end, Boothby’s challenge is for us to remain open to das Ding. In a similar manner, every effective analyst must undergo a transformation in their desire. One that becomes directed to the unconscious in the other. In the face of the das Ding of the other, the monstrousness of the neighbor, the analyst like the saint courageously welcomes what others have at best only ever tolerated. The analyst with a sincere and gentle curiosity, without judgment welcomes das Ding's arrival. This openness to the otherness of the other and even to the otherness in oneself, is what Boothby sees as the injunction of Christ: to love not only the neighbor, but also the enemy.
